This article is a review of ONE DAY.

What’s up with the accents? What’s up with the casting? I found out afterwards that Anne Hathaway’s Emma was meant to be from Yorkshire. Jim Sturgess goes for Brit upper class. His voice grates like that scene in one of the Pink Panthers where Herbert Lom’s Dreyfus is torturing a captive by scrapping a blackboard. I just don’t buy it. What also I don’t buy more importantly is Hathaway as some frumpy wall flower. Hello! She’s going to be Catwoman next year!! A colleague suggested that actually Jodie Whittaker (playing Emma’s BFF Tilly) would’ve been better. Not a bad suggestion at all, she is pretty but believably might not always succeed in the romantic stakes; whereas the stunning Hathaway just feels like a misguided casting meeting, where I imagine that some exec went, “Just put some ugly specs on her and in some baggy trousers”.

"Either you are on coke or you got dysentery, either way it's boring!" Emma

Starting in 2006 with Emma riding around London on a bike, the film quickly rewinds 20 years and the last day of uni at Edinburgh for Emma and Dexter (Sturgess). A drunken night out ends with Dexter back at Emma’s place, where for some unknown reason he turns down her advances. WTF! The movie goes onto show he’s a bit of a slag in that area. And the idea that someone with the charm of Dexter and the looks of Sturgess would even be in that position, let alone swat it away, is more fantastic than the execrable COWBOYS & ALIENS. Then for the next two decades we catch up with them on that anniversary, the 15th July. She spends the whole time pining after him, similarly to Carrie and “Big” in SEX AND THE CITY. What kind of message is that sending out to women that that is wish fulfilment?

Dexter turns out to be a bit of a c-bomb, crapping self-hatingly on those dear to him, while Emma gets trapped in a mutually crushing relationship with Ian (Rafe Spall). This is depressing and unromantic, which is fine; but it seems to be saying that this is romance, and compounded by an ending that undermines everything gone before - tacked on, for that “grace note” feeling it seems, so audiences don’t slit their wrists.

The one thing which prevents ONE DAY from entering the one star doldrums of 27 DRESSES and BRIDE WARS is the banter, which can be funny and diverting; but not enough to mask the story.

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